The Chinese fascination with numbers – and how much they are part of both online and offline lives – is a societal quirk that baffles long-term tourists and expats alike.
As a newly minted Beijinger, there were certain things my brain quickly scrambled to make room for: the exact time I needed to leave home in the mornings to avoid being squashed into human dumpling filling on the rush-hour subway ride; the location of the best spots for mala xiang guo (a stir-fried version of hot pot); to never flush toilet paper; and to never, ever attempt eating a soup dumpling by putting it straight into your mouth (poke and slurp, people!).
One task, though, seemed impossible: remembering my QQ number, a string of randomly assigned digits that served as the user identification for the QQ messaging service our office – and many others in China – used.
It seemed living in China meant being constantly bombarded by numbers
As the only foreign employee in my department, I was also clearly the only one with this problem. My Chinese co-workers had no difficulty rattling off their own 10-digit, or in some cases nine-digit, IDs. No-one else felt the need to run over to his or her computer like a total idiot to check every time someone asked them. In case you didn’t realise, that idiot was/is me. Since that day two years ago, when a colleague helped me set it up, I’ve never once signed out of my QQ account, nervous that I’ll not be able to log back in at all. If you asked me what my QQ ID was, after more than 104 weeks of living in China and using this messaging service, I would not be able to tell you.
I once asked the British guy working in the office next to ours if he remembered his. He did not. Neither could my two American friends. “What do those numbers mean?” we’d whined to each other. “There’s no order of any kind to them. Why not just use letters?!” I had been tempted to place the blame squarely on our collective terrible memories but turns out, there was possibly more to this. None of the locals we’d asked seemed to find anything unusual about remembering not only long strings of QQ digits, but also various other sets of numbers in other areas of their everyday lives. They turned up in website domain names. They were part of internet slang. Certain numbers assumed significance in cultural beliefs: some were auspicious; others were to be fled from at all cost. Once I started looking, it seemed living in China meant being constantly bombarded by numbers, much more so than in other countries and cultures. And none of my Chinese co-workers or friends were quite sure why.
“I’ve heard the train fares on the CTrip website are kinda high,” my Sichuanese roommate Panbi told me, back when I first moved here, as we discussed my Chinese New Year travel plans. “Why don’t you try 12306?
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